Posts tagged influence marketing

I’m going to tell you a story about food but make a point about content, influence and service. Ready?

In theory, I love Whole Foods. I love the vision, the philosophy and the concept, and I love getting really good food. So far so good, but there is one thing that I don’t love: The vast amount of choices I have to make at every stop.

I get lost in Whole Foods, I feel overwhelmed, I come out with more than I intended to buy and, most often, with more than my family can eat before the expiration date.

I need a personal shopper! I need a place where someone has made this selection for me. I needed a personal relationship, not another aisle of food displays.

It was a dilemma for me … until I found Trader Joe’s. I became an instant fan of this specialty food shop. Sure they have great food, but Trader Joe’s also has something else – a distinctly human experience at the checkout – every single time. Without fail, I come out feeling amazing! This place has earned my trust and tickles my endorphins.

Talk about addictive … I want this concept to be everywhere in my world but, chiefly, I want this for my content consumption – I want someone who really knows a particular topic to curate what’s out there. But that’s not all – I need to feel amazing after reading or watching the content. I need this experience to be human, visionary, and trustworthy.

And this is the key to social media marketing today, too.

Enter the social media influencer

Today, if you’re in marketing to any extent, you’ll know about influencers and, more importantly, about influence marketing.

What makes a great influencer? Influencers are humans, clearly, not automated content management systems. They are mega-connected on social media (aka they have earned the trust of many other humans to deliver on what they promise) and they have the unique ability to inspire action. The good influencers out there have great knowledge in a particular field, know how to curate that knowledge, add their unique vision and value, and they know how to communicate with their audiences.

If I am a brand, I totally love that potential, that opportunity, that has only been created in the last few years. How can my brand become part of an influencer’s curated content (and in a positive light, hopefully!).

The brand rules of influence

Well, above all, I have to have a high quality brand because the influencer’s top priority is to never disappoint or lose the trust of his or her audience. So, as a brand I have to earn the influencer’s trust. I have to invest in building a strong human-to-human relationship with the influencer. I need to understand the mutual value proposition and the joint value creation between my brand and the influencer. It’s not a pitch, it’s a person — a common mistake being made out there today!

The relationship-building starts by carefully selecting the influencer to work with (someone whose thinking and values are aligned with my brand). Next I would begin to interact with the influencer in a variety of ways: online and possibly face-to-face, as part of the process of mutually vetting each other. Then I can begin to integrate the influencer into my brand’s presence.

Now fast forward … the relationship has been built and is maturing, trust has been established and we are ready for mutual value creation. We are ready for an influencer activation.

An influence case study

An activation example can be illustrated at the #DellLounge during SXSWi. Our Marketing VP tasked a cross-functional team to design a Social Business Unconference that would attract a SXSWi audience – social media experts and influencers, social media researchers and academics – in short, a tough audience who’d be very vocal about the experience. The goal was clear: help establish my brand (Dell) as a true thought leader in social business through content that is visionary, conversational, and distinctive.

I call this a dream assignment for anyone who works with influencers! We carefully chose four expert influencers in social business with whom we had established quality human relationships. Then we took the concept of an audience-driven Unconference and compressed it into a little over two hours. Each influencer gave a 10 minute presentation, familiarizing the audience with their unique perspective on social business.

During each presentation, the audience was encouraged to propose topics of their own interest for the four breakout sessions that would follow the presentations. After all topic submissions (via Twitter) were collected, the audience voted, in real time, on what they wanted to explore further in each of the breakout sessions. Our expert influencers led the breakout discussions and after that were available for a Q&A to address more audience questions.

The results are in

From the beginning of the event we could sense the excitement and energy around the discussions but even we were unprepared for the incredible success in terms of social media engagement. Our hashtag trended on Twitter (eclipsing even #SXSW!) and we had a reach of over 29 million.

In two hours we achieved a social media impact that is more typical of an event that lasts for several days! And the conversation has been extended via resulting earned and owned blog posts and articles recapping the event.

This was only possible due to a meticulously planned and executed social media influencer and event strategy based on strong personal relationships with high impact individuals.

We had created a Trader Joe’s experience of top curated content via our influencers and improved it via our audience’s input, in real time. Fuel for everyone’s endorphins.

Dr. Konstanze Alex-Brown (@Konstanze, LinkedIn) leads Global Communications Social Media strategy at Dell. Prior to that, Konnie spent six years in executive, technology and innovation communications at Dell. She has co-authored several peer reviewed articles on the value of internal social media from a social capital perspective and has presented at various academic and industry conferences. Her research focus is on corporate communication using social media technologies and organizational social capital. To read more of Konstanze’s work, check out her personal blog.

Every day I get nonsensical pitches asking me to become a brand advocate and write about a brand, watch a demo for a brand, or accept a guest post (about auto glass tinting, tanning beds, accounting software?). I guess it’s predictable … like anything in business, when people find a good thing, everybody piles on.

But what dismays me is that even many great companies are doing this all wrong. Like any consumer, I form relationships with my favorite products almost as if they were my friends. This notion seems to be lost on most people tapping into influence marketing.

So sitting in the seat of a company marketing executive trying to get my attention, here is what I would do. This is a personal post. I am only speaking for myself. But I think these general themes probably also apply to many other “Citizen Influencers” who have a powerful online voice.

Here is your game plan for getting your product mentioned on my blog (and speeches and classes and podcasts).

1. Make it real

Tom Webster and I have a new sponsor for our Marketing Companion podcast, gShift. I have become a true fan of this brand. Why?

I have known gShift’s marketing director Jonathan Barrick for years through this blog and Twitter, long before he was even in his current position. He flew all the way from Toronto to attend Social Slam where we got to meet in real life for the first time.

So when Jonathan approached me about advocacy, he immediately had my attention because I already knew him and trusted him. Our relationship was real.

2. Have patience

Building a real relationship like I just mentioned does not happen over an email and it does not fit neatly into a company’s quarterly sales objective. Building a trusting relationship is not a campaign, it is not something with a guaranteed payoff in your timeframe. It requires patience, and most companies don’t have patience.

3. Respect for my time

Is there anybody reading this who is NOT busy? Of course you are. As an entrepreneur, I HAVE to make every hour of my life count.

This is why I don’t have 30 minutes to give you (a stranger) feedback on your product demo. If you REALLY want my time, if you TRULY value my opinion, are you willing to pay me for it? If you’re not, then you’re simply using me.

There is a very large organization lobbying to get me involved in their annual meeting. They want me to fly across the country and spend three days with their leaders. For free.

I am eager to help them but I’m not an executive of a big company with a fat expense account. For me to make this trip, it literally replaces three days of consulting, teaching, or content creation I could be doing to feed my family. Taking this time out of my schedule is a tangible economic loss.

I am not demanding that I be paid for “advocacy.” Not at all. If you earn it, I’m an advocate. But I think companies need to view influencers as humans, not “channels,” and respect them enough to make them economically whole if they are creating value for your company. There. I said it. I want to be paid for my time.

4. A brand advocate through true value.

I had a wonderful experience with IBM last year. I attended one of their conferences (they paid me a small amount to make me economically whole) and I got a chance to meet executives and engineers working on cutting-edge ideas and systems. For a blogger and a teacher, this is pure heaven!

Subsequently, IBM’s ideas have been showing up in my classes and speeches. I would guess in the last 12 months 5,000 people have heard me mention IBM and they are not paying me to do it. I BELIEVE in what they are doing and they gave me extraordinary insight — not a sales pitch — so I could do my job better. That is advocacy done right.

5. Agency for advocacy?

In my book Return On Influence (the first book written about this subject), I predicted that specialty agencies would emerge to speciliaze in influence marketing.

This is happening. And in some cases, large PR or ad agencies are developing influence marketing departments. It’s a hot trend.

But I am conflicted about this. I recognize the opportunity for partnering with third-party specialists, but is it smart to out-source key business relationships?

6. Follow through

Last year a company threw a lavish dinner for a group of influential bloggers. It was extremely well done. The company facilitated conversations without “selling” and I had the opportunity to really get to know some of their executives.

And then, I never heard from them again.

That just makes no sense. Remember, we’re building trusting relationships here. Let me hear from you now and then.

So there are a few ideas for you. Again, I’m not speaking for everybody out here but I think these are real issues to developing relationships that result in true advocacy.

Possibly no trend has captured the attention of marketers more than the opportunity to tap into the emerging group of Citizen Influencers. Propelled by their content and legions of loyal fans, true product advocates are seen as an extremely powerful force for any online marketing mix these days.

It has also been the scene of some ugly abuses, desperate pitches, and a frenzied level of start-up activity trying to capitalize on the trend.

The field seems to have gained some legitimacy — and maybe some early signs of maturity — when Lithium bought Klout earlier this year for $200 million. This week, another start-up in the brand advocacy space, Branderati, was acquired by social media marketing/analytics company Sprinklr.

Branderati’s CMO Ekaterina Walter was kind enough to provide a State of the Union assessment on influence marketing for our {grow} community:

Schaefer: So you have spent the last year in the trenches of influence marketing and lived to tell about it! What has changed the most in this this field over the past 12 months?

Walter: When I started with Branderati, we knew we had a lot to prove. Not only about our platform and our unique point of view, but about advocacy marketing as a whole.

Over the past year we have witnessed a much wider acceptance of the power of advocacy marketing to drive real results. The conversation has changed. We spend far less time talking about how much we need to pay influencers to write content for us and how many followers they have, and spend more energy on identifying the true advocate influencers who truly believed in the power of a brand and wanted to engage with it.

Even industry investments have changed. For last several years we have seen VCs validating the future of advocacy marketing with major investments. With the Branderati acquisition we have witnessed the first transaction that says advocacy marketing isn’t just important, but it has a critical place at the table. Sprinklr has come out and told the marketplace that it is a critical component of the integrated social media stack.

Of course the big question is, how do you measure this stuff? What breakthroughs are occurring in the field of measurement and how will the new alliance with Sprinklr enable that?

The breakthroughs are occurring everywhere. We are dramatically reducing the cost of social sharing at scale. We are unlocking the keys to using advocate influencers to increase conversion rates in e-commerce. And we have so much upside in leveraging advocates to not only help us market products, but to give us the feedback and insight needed to develop and improve those products.

Examples? While many brands are experiencing less than 10% reach across their social platforms, with direct access to their advocate influencers, Branderati clients have experienced as high as 68.5% social sharing engagement. They also realized the cost of this authentic social sharing is about one-seventh of the cost of incremental social sharing driven through their traditional media campaigns.

Over the next 12 to 24 months you are going to see some really amazing case studies and analysis from Sprinklr showcasing the cost effectiveness of advocacy, the impact on e-commerce, and the power of leveraging advocates as market research partners.

Many of the top influencers are becoming jaded or even weary of the endless brand pitches. Some mommy bloggers have agents now. Even I get so many pitches that I rarely even open them any more. How does a company cut through that clutter to establish something meaningful with online influencers?

We have one question we ask ourselves and our clients that speaks directly to this issue. “How do we make our advocates and influencers heroes?”

What we are trying to get at is what can we do to support the people that help and love us to make them even more effective? How can we expose our bloggers to new audiences and help their careers? How can we give our top fans the social currency that will increase their influence? Like any relationship, it’s an economy of fair exchange.

Branderati technology and expertise brings several things to the equation. First, our screening technology captures API and self-reported data to align potential advocates with predefined profiles of ideal ambassadors. This capability is critical for any brand looking to create highly vetted advocacy networks at scale.

We have also created members-only programs that are highly targeted and personalized to each ambassador.

Third, from a measurement standpoint there are very specific types of tracking data we provide in order to track ambassadors’ true impact.

I’m tired of the arguments between PR and marketing about owning this influencer function. Where do you stand on it?

The question shouldn’t be marketing versus PR. It’s how can these two functions align in goals and infrastructure to manage the right people at the right time with the right content against a unified strategy. This is precisely the type of collaboration we will be trying to usher in as part of Sprinklr.

You moved from Intel to the start-up world rather seamlessly it appears to me! You worked hard to build a recognized and respected personal brand. How has that helped you at this point in your career?

It sure has been a wild ride. And a very satisfying one.

I don’t look at my personal brand as basis for my career opportunities. I rather look at it as a result of hard work that goes into painting the blank canvas, coming up with creative strategies, building the right relationships.

First you need to be passionate about something, then you need to be willing to spend time acquiring and sharpening your knowledge, then you execute on it, and then you should be willing to share your experience to help someone else do their job better (whether though writing, speaking, or mentoring). And only then can you build a brand people respect and appreciate. It’s not the other way around.

It doesn’t happen overnight. By helping people along the way in your career (either within the company or outside of it) you build a network of people who become the advocates of your vision, your knowledge, and your shared beliefs. It works the same way either you build a personal brand or a corporate one.

A few months ago I was at a huge tech industry conference. A sponsoring company had a massive LED “leaderboard” showing the leading influencers tweeting about the conference.

There were a few people who I recognized but quite a few I didn’t. I asked the administrator what constituted an “influencer” by their definition and the woman told me “number of Twitter followers.”

At this point, please insert a mental image of Mark Schaefer as a cartoon character that just drank a gallon of hot sauce. You know, steam out the ears, eyes popping out on springs … that sort of thing. I was embarassed for this Fortune 500 company that equates Twitter followers with influence. That is so 2011.

Today we need more than that, right? Problem is, for cheapskates like me it’s getting harder and harder to find free tools to use. As influence marketing has gotten hotter, the prices have gone up on great platforms like Traakr and Appinions which don’t even offer free trials any more.

So here are a few work-arounds for people trying to get a handle on influence marketing on the cheap.

Free influencer research tools

1. Fake Guru Sniffer

Let’s go back to the tech industry conference.

There was one “influencer” who looked kind of suspicious to me. He had more than 300,000 Twitter followers and I had never heard of the guy before, I know how long it takes to build a real Twitter following and I was suspicious that this guy was a fake.

There’s a handy tool to check for fake gurus from our friends at SocialBakers. It has the not-too-creative name of Fake Follower Check but it’s free so who am I to complain? If you are vetting people for an influencer program, this can be a useful first step to check their credibility.

Do they really have reach … or did they (gasp) buy their Twitter followers to just look like a big deal? My Fake Follower score is 98%, which means that only 2% of my followers are inactive or suspicious accounts. This reflects the effort I put into building an authentic Twitter audience. When I put Mr. Suspicious in this box, he had a score of 64%. Just as I thought. He bought his followers to try to LOOK like he had authority. Connecting with him would be a waste of money for your brand.

2. An indicator that people listen to you

There was something else quite strange about Mr. Suspicious. He had all those followers but was only on 74 Twitter Lists.

This is a very important metric because you might be able to fake your followers but it’s very difficult to fake your way on to Twitter Lists. When somebody puts you on a list, this means the follower is at least savvy enough to use lists and cares enough about what you’re saying to highlight your content.

So a really good shortcut to determine somebody’s potential impact is to look at the ratio of lists to followers. But there’s one little snag in our plan. When Twitter went through their overhaul last year, for some crazy reason they eliminated the number that shows how many times you’ve been listed! So we need a work-around.

To easily see how many lists a person is on, you’re going to need the free version of Tweetdeck. Click on your name in a tweet and a little profile box pops up. This is the ONLY place I know of to easily see how many lists a person is on!

So about 8 percent of my followers think enough of me to put me on a list. For Mr. Suspicious, this ratio is like 2 hundredths of a percent. That makes sense — as we already saw, a large percentage of his followers are fake.

3. An engagement monitor

With our first two tools we have established that a potential influencer has a real audience and people are paying attention to them.

Our next tool will show you a bit about their engagement levels. Are they just posting links or are they really engaging with folks? Are people actually reacting to their content?

Let’s now turn to TwtrLand.com. Although they have a paid version (starting at $19.99), you can see enough on the free edition to learn how communicative the person is and also get an idea of who they are having conversations with. Are they engaged with your ultimate target market? This tool is a high-level indicator.

4. Influence by topic

You’re probably going to want to dive down a little deeper now and find certain influencers by topic. There are not a lot of totally free and comprehensive tools I know of to do this but here are some hacks:

Kred allows you to search influencers by hashtag. So you can look for people in the #travel industry for example and you will get a leaderboard in return as well as some of the top tweets on that topic (good content source!)

The problem with Kred is that it is very Twitter-centric.

One idea is to combine this Kred output with the data from the free version of NOD3x, which provides insight into data coming from Google+ and YouTube.

A third free tool to look at is BuzzSumo. This application returns the top content in any category by the number of social shares. It takes a little work but you can begin to see patterns of the top authors in certain subject areas.

5. The magic of moving content

Connecting to influencers can be a very powerful marketing strategy but they have to be people who can move content (also known as creating buzz). How can we figure out if somebody can move content better than another?

There is probably no more divisive tool on the web but let’s take the emotion of “influence” out of the conversation for a moment and simply look at Klout as relative measure of a person’s ability to move content.

For example, Brian Solis with an astronomical Klout score of 84 shows that he can move content better than me, with a score of 76. That makes sense. I blog and am active on the social web so my score is probably higher than many of my students, for example. So Klout isn’t perfect but it means something.

Klout has made a lot of changes … some for the better, some for the worse (that is a debate for another time!) … but the core score is stable, it’s still FREE and it provides a useful relative comparison. It is a blunt instrument, but sometimes all you need is a blunt instrument as long as you have a realistic perspective of what it is and the limitations.

Well if you are working on influence on the cheap, these free influencer research tools should help you. If you really want to get the inside scoop on social influence marketing fundamentals, you might also enjoy my book Return On Influence. And please let me know in the comment section if there are any cheapskate tools you like to use!

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit IBM’s Midsize Insider. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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-Mark Schaefer